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Monday, October 1, 2007

This is a non-"wild" batch, but still pretty interesting. I based this one on a few big stouts and porters being brewing by the newly resurgent Scandinavian craft brewing movement.

This recipe combines plenty of interesting ingredients including heavy toast American oak cubes that soaked in Maker's Mark Bourbon for a few weeks, licorice root, cardamom, and heather honey.

I wanted to leave this one pretty sweet to make sure that it would be a good wintertime sipper so I mashed pretty hot to counteract the highly fermentable honey. I also went low on the IBUs in anticipation the a combination of the tannins from the wood, alcohol, and spices would help to balance out the sweetness.

I really built a water for this batch making sure to have plenty of bicarbonate to balance out the acidity of the dark malts in the mash and plenty of chloride and sodium to accent the sweet malt profile.

Added water salts to distilled water to get a profile high in carbonate, sodium, and chloride.

4 oz of the roasted barley, ground, was added at 10 min left in the mash because the color did not look as dark as I wanted..

5.5 gallons of 1.060 runnings collected.

Licorice Root was bought whole at a natural food store and chopped up into small chunks.

Two pinches of ground Cardamom added at flame out, hopefully not noticeable aside from complexity in the finished beer. Cardamom is traditional in Scandinavian desserts, so it seems appropriate here.

Honey dissolved in a few cups of wort cooled to around 100 degrees then dumped into the bucket. The rest of the wort was cooled to around 66, then strained on top of the liquefied honey.

Hit with 70 seconds of O2 right before transfer to the 5 gallon carboy

Because it was a small batch and I didn't have time I pitched the yeast pack straight in, hopefully not making a starter won't come back to haunt me (but I do have a pack of US-56 as backup)

Room temp around 68 to start, closer to 62 for the next 36 hours. Up to 66 during the 3rd day, blowoff started, beautiful chocolate aroma.

Fermentation seems to be starting after 14 hours.

3/28/07 Up to 75 ambient for a few hours in the day. Krausen dropped, so I took a sample. Already down to 1.035 (66% AA), basically where I want it. Still really yeasty, but already showing good tasting signs.

3/29/07 Warm through the day and cool again at night.

3/31/07 Transferred to secondary down to 1.032 (69% AA, 9.5% ABV) with 2 oz (after soaking, the total weight of 2 oz went to 3.25) of the heavy toast American oak that has been in Makers Mark for a couple of weeks. Flavor is actually not bad, toasty with lots of chocolate, this one should be killer if the flavor doesn't come out muddy.

4/13/07 1.75 oz of corn sugar for 2.15 volumes of CO2

7/06/07 Carbonation is still pretty minimal, but the beer is fantastic. Already has an aged dried fruit character and the light vanilla note from the oak/bourbon is perfect. Can't wait to see how this one is going next winter.

This one was in secondary for just two weeks. Not sure where I came up with 75 days, but longer would have been nice for more oak/spirit character. Age to taste, and add extra bourbon at bottling if it needs it.